What a prediction market is
A prediction market is a real-money market on a yes/no question — “will X happen?” A contract pays out a fixed amount (say $1) if the answer turns out to be yes, and nothing if it's no. So a contract trading at $0.60 is the market saying the “yes” side is worth 60 cents on the dollar right now. Flip that into a percentage and you get the implied probability: 60%. That's the single number the trackers on this site surface.
What an “implied probability” means
A price of 60% isn't a prediction that the outcome willhappen — it's the level at which traders are collectively willing to take both sides of the bet. Read it like this: if this exact situation played out many times, the market thinks the outcome happens roughly 60% of the time. Outcomes priced at 15% still happen sometimes; favourites at 85% lose sometimes too. The number is a snapshot of belief weighted by money — not a certainty, and not a recommendation.
Why the price moves
A prediction market re-prices the instant new information lands — a poll, a result, an injury, a resignation, a court ruling. When you watch a tracker tick, you're watching a crowd update its belief in real time as the facts change. A market drifting from 45% to 60% over a week isn't noise; it's the aggregate of everyone who put money behind a changed view. That movement is often more informative than the level itself — it tells you which way the evidence is pointing.
What the number is not
It is not a forecast by Monitoring, and it is not advice. We don't set the price or predict the outcome — we mirror what a public, real-money market is already pricing, and explain how to read it. A price is also not a certainty: a 90% favourite loses one time in ten, and thin markets can move on very little money, so a low-liquidity price carries less signal than a heavily-traded one. Treat every number here as an observation, not a verdict.
Are prediction markets accurate?
Over a large number of events, prediction markets tend to be reasonably well-calibrated: things priced around 70% happen about 70% of the time. That's a property of the average across many markets, not a guarantee for any single one. Any individual price can be wrong, and a market with little money behind it is easy to push around. The honest way to use a market is as one well-priced data point among others — a fast, money-weighted read on where a crowd stands, updated the moment the world changes.
Calibration is a claim you can only check by writing prices down before events resolve and scoring them afterwards. That is what Monitoring's accuracy ledger does: each entry records what every venue priced ahead of resolution, with sources and timestamps, and the outcome is filled in only once it is actually known.